body language – Pain In The Bud

Another Tech Company Wants To Translate Meows And Barks Using AI: Can It Work?

Cats and dogs communicate primarily by scent, touch and body language, but human efforts to understand them have focused exclusively on meows and barks. If we want to truly understand our non-human friends, we need to take an approach that considers the other ways animals “talk” to each other.

A few years ago when MeowTalk made a minor splash in the startup world, I was pretty bullish on its potential to help us understand our cats better.

Sure, the app had an unhelpful habit of attributing improbably loving declarations to Buddy, but I thought it would follow the trajectory of other machine learning models and drastically improve as it accumulated more data.

More users meant the app would record and analyze more meows, chirps and trills, meaning it was just a matter of time before the AI would be able to distinguish between an “I want attention!” meow and a “My bowl is dangerously close to empty!” meow.

Obviously that didn’t happen, and what I personally didn’t take into account back then — and should have, given how obvious it is in retrospect — is that cats don’t just communicate via vocalizations.

In fact, cats don’t normally incorporate vocalizations into communication at all. Pet kitties do it entirely for our benefit because they know we’re generally awful at interpreting body language and we are completely useless when it comes to olfactory information.

It’s actually amazing when you really think about how much of the heavy lifting cats do in our efforts to communicate with each other. They recognize we can’t communicate the way they do naturally, so they try to relate to us on our terms. In return, we meet them less than halfway.

No wonder Buddy sometimes looks frustrated as he meows at me, as if I’m the biggest moron in the world for not understanding the very obvious thing he’s trying to tell me.

“Human, how can you not understand the simple feeling of innerer schweinehund I’m trying to convey here? The cringe is killing me!”

Now the Chinese tech giant Baidu is throwing its hat into the ring after filing a patent in China for an AI system that uses machine learning to decode animal communication and “translate” it to human language.

Machines are designed to process things from a human viewpoint according to human logic, so if Baidu wants to succeed where MeowTalk has not, its engineers will need to take a thoughtful approach with the help of animal behavior experts.

This is a hard problem that encompasses animal cognition, neuroscience, linguistics, biology, biochemistry and even philosophy. If they approach this strictly as a tech challenge, they’ll set themselves up for failure.

Without the information and context clues provided by tails, whiskers, facial expressions, posture, eye dilation, heart rate, pheromones and even fur, an AI system is only getting a fraction of the information cats are trying to convey.

Trying to glean meaning from that is like trying to read a book in which only every fourth or fifth letter is legible. There’s just too much missing information.

Even if we can train machines to analyze sound visual, tactile and olfactory information, it may not be possible to truly translate what our cats are saying to us. We may have to settle for approximations. We’ve only begun to guess at how the world is interpreted differently among human beings thanks to things like qualia and neurodivergence, and the way cats and dogs see the world is undoubtedly more strange to us than the way a neurodivergent person might make sense of reality.

“He grimaced. He had drawn a greedy old character, a tough old male whose mind was full of slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans full of half-spoiled fish. Father Moontree had once said that he burped cod liver oil for weeks after drawing that particular glutton, so strongly had the telepathic image of fish impressed itself upon his mind. Yet the glutton was a glutton for danger as well as for fish. He had killed sixty-three Dragons, more than any other Partner in the service, and was quite literally worth his weight in gold.” – Cordwainer Smith, The Game of Rat and Dragon

An animal’s interpretation of reality may be so psychologically alien that most of its communication may be apples to oranges at best. Which is why I always loved Cordwainer Smith’s description of the feline mind as experienced via a technology that allows humans with special talents to share thoughts with cats in his classic short story, The Game of Rat and Dragon.

In the story, humans are a starfaring civilization and encounter a threat in the void between stars that people don’t have the reaction speed to deal with. Cats, however, are fast and swift enough, and with a neural bridge device, teams of humans paired with cats are able to keep passengers safe on interstellar journeys.

The narrator, who is one of the few people with an affinity for teaming up with felines, hopes he’ll be paired with one of his two favorite cats for his latest mission, but instead he’s assigned to partner with an old glutton of a tomcat whose mind was dominated by “slobbering thoughts of food, veritable oceans of half-spoiled fish.”

The narrator wryly notes that the last time one of his colleagues was paired with that particular cat, his burps tasted of fish for weeks afterward. But the cat in question, despite being obsessed with fish, is a badass at killing “dragons,” the human nickname for the bizarre entities that attack human ships in space. (The software that allows felines and humans to link thoughts also portrays the “dragons” as rodents in the minds of the cats, stimulating their ancient predatory drive so they’ll attack instantly when they see the enemy.)

We can’t know for sure if Smith’s interpretation of the feline mind is accurate, but another part rang true when he wrote that cat thoughts were all about the moment, filled with sentiments of warmth and affection, while they rapidly lost interest in thoughts about human concerns, dismissing them “as so much rubbish.”

If the mind of a cat is that relatable, we’ll be incredibly lucky. But in reality we’re dealing with animals who evolved in drastically different ecological niches, with different priorities, motivations, and ways of looking at the world — literally and figuratively.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand our furry friends. Research has yielded interesting information about the way animals like whales and elephants communicate, and AI is at its best when it augments human creativity and curiosity instead of trying to replace it.

Even if we don’t end up with a way to glean 1:1 translations, the prospect of improving our understanding of animal minds is tantalizing enough. We just need to make sure we’re listening to everything they’re saying, not just the meows.

Does The Budster Love Me?

“Love is a strong word, human. I prefer ‘tolerate.’ On days when you anticipate my snack cravings before I verbalize them, you could maybe say I’m fond of you.”

Newsweek has an interesting interview with a cat behaviorist on the subject of whether cats love their humans.

Chantal Howard, a certified cat trainer with Feline Focus Training in Ottawa, told the magazine there are nine primary behaviors that indicate — or confirm — a house tiger loves his or her person. Most of these won’t be new to PITB readers, who are of course among the most cat-savvy people out there and have magnificent taste in cat blogs, but it’s still a handy way to ascertain how your feline overlord feels about you.

So how does Buddy do according to this checklist? Let’s see:

Headbutting: ✅ His Lordship is quite fond of headbutting me and favors me with dozens of headbutts throughout the day, ensuring his pheromones remain on me. You know, in case some other cat somehow comes wandering in and there’s a dispute about which furball owns me.
Kneading: ✅ Considering the fact that I’ve had to toss quite a few t-shirts because of claw rips, I’d say that’s a yes. At least he doesn’t knead my face anymore, as he liked to do when he was a kitten and would take his perch on my shoulder, nuzzle up to my neck and make biscuits against my beard.
Purring: ✅ Nine times out of 10, Buddy’s purr is inaudible, but it’s there. It’s a bit odd that such a talkative, loud cat barely makes a buzz. He likes to lay on my chest and purr up a storm while I rub his head and tell him he’s got admirers all over the world.
Chirping: ✅ Yes! In fact, chirps and trills make up a significant part of the Buddinese language. While meows can be positive, negative or demanding (“I can see the bottom of my bowl! This is an outrage, human!”), trills and chirps are always happy sounds.
Nipping: ✅ Unfortunately, yes.
Licking: ✅ He grooms my hair and my beard, and when I shave he licks my face, which is pretty gross.
Bringing Gifts: ❌ Negative. Then again, what kind of gifts can he bring me when he’s an indoor cat and doesn’t fully understand the concept of hunting?
Exposing Belly: ❌ Does he expose his belly? Yes. Does he feel comfortable enough to snooze in my lap with his belly exposed? Of course. Does he want me to give him belly rubs? No, he emphatically does not. The primordial pouch is not to be touched!
Tail Position: ✅ One of the most awesome things is the fact that Bud’s tail goes immediately into happy mode when I say “Hi, Bud!”, when I hold my hand out for a headbutt, and when I talk to him in general. His tail quivers with excitement when we play with the laser pointer or his favorite toy, and when he catches the first whiff of catnip.

So that’s 7 of 9, or 7 of 8 if we count gifts as N/A due to Bud’s hilarious ineptitude when it comes to even grasping the concept of hunting.

Bud has been known to throw up from excitement when I return from vacation, he often naps by the door when I go out, he talks to me constantly, and he’s rarely more than three or four feet away from me at any given time. All those things, plus our strong bond, have proven to me that he does love me, but it’s also nice to confirm it with a behaviorist’s criteria.

How does your cat perform on the checklist? Don’t forget to share your results in the comments.

Study: We’re All Terrible At Reading Our Cats’ Facial Expressions

It turns out cat owners are no better than random people when it comes to this task.

Most of us completely suck at deciphering our cats’ facial expressions, according to a new study.

That might come as a surprise to some because it’s often claimed cats don’t have facial expressions, or they can’t be read. They do, and they can.

The researchers from Ontario’s University of Guelph used a series of short clips selected from YouTube cat videos. They stripped all the context and blacked out everything but each cat’s face so participants wouldn’t be able to read body language or identify what the cats were doing.

The people who participated in the study — more than 6,000 in all — had only the faces to go on, and they were asked to assess whether each cat’s facial expression was positive or negative.

It turns out reading feline facial expressions is especially difficult: On average, participants got only 11.85 out of 20 questions right. That’s less than 60 percent.

Here’s the crazy part: Researchers found cat owners were no better at interpreting cat expressions than random people. Veterinarians scored the highest, a result that makes perfect sense.

surprised-cat-1 — **“No, I did NOT drink from the toilet! How dare you impugn my character with such vulgar accusations, good sir!”**

Less than 15 percent of people are “cat whisperers,” study author Georgia Mason said, and can correctly interpret a cat’s mood based on the face alone.

“Anyone who writes cats off as sort of moody or distant is probably underestimating them,” Mason said. “The point is they are signaling, it’s just subtle and you need expertise and maybe intuition to see it.”

If you’re wondering what the test looks like, you can take an abbreviated version of it online. Here’s my score:

I’m a cat whisperer! Okay, not really. I scored a lousy four out of eight in the advanced version of the test.

I’m accustomed to reading feline body language — whiskers, ears, tails and fur provide a wealth of information about a cat’s mood — and absent most of that information, I found it difficult to gauge based on their faces alone.

On the positive side, scientists say the lessons from these studies can be applied to our companion cats eventually.

“We’re hoping [to conduct] more research to develop tools to help people read their cat better,” Mason said. “That would make living with a cat more rewarding.”

Top photo credit: BBC Science Focus